1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for driving an electro-optical device. More particularly, the present invention relates to an electro-optical device, such as a liquid crystal device, which includes a driving apparatus, such as, for example, a liquid crystal projector, and a method for driving an electro-optical device.
2. Related Art
An electro-optical device controls the orientation of an electro-optical substance interposed between a pair of electrodes, such as liquid crystal substance, by applying a driving voltage corresponding to an image signal between the pair of electrodes, causing an image to be displayed. The driving voltage is applied with the polarity of the driving voltage being reversed, so as to prevent burn-in or flicker from being created in the displayed image. In particular, parasitic capacitance occurs between data lines of an image signal which are used to prescribe gradation of pixels and pixel rows connected to the data lines. This parasitic capacitance causes display unevenness to occur in the displayed image in a direction along the data line.
Japanese Patent Application JP-A-2004-45967 discloses a technique for reducing the display unevenness and improving an image quality of a displayed image by changing the order that the image signal is supplied to the data line. Another Japanese Patent Application, JP-A-2005-43418, discloses a technique for increasing the speed of writing data into the pixels and thus suppressing the display unevenness by overlapping the correction voltage, wherein the polarity is reversed according to the polarity of the driving voltage so as to overlap the correction voltage with the driving voltage corresponding to the image signal. The overlapped correction voltage is then applied.
One difficulty with these techniques, however, is that although the display unevenness can be improved to some extent, a lot of display unevenness remains, meaning that further improvement of the image quality is required. For example, in an electro-optical device equipped in an apparatus, such as a liquid crystal projector, a thin film transistor is used to switch the timing control of the driving voltage sent to, for example, a pixel electrode. Because the pixel electrode is exposed to strong light, current leakage can occur. In other words, there is a problem that the occurrence of light current leakage causes a reduction in the potential of the pixel electrode and increases the unevenness of the displayed image.